Weekly news: startups in Eastern Europe

This week my Evernote is bursting with stories about Russian and eastern European startups. So here we go.

Deal flow

A large funding round of Russian business marketplace B2B Center was announced today. PE firms and Runa Capital bought a minority stake in the company for $45 million.

Seedcamp and 500 Startups invested in Latvian Repairy, which appears to be a straight-forward cloud service which helps auto repair shops streamline their business processes from registering incoming orders to ordering spare parts.

EWDN reports that “Siri for Android” Speaktoit, a mobile app that allows to interact with Android phones via voice command has raised an undisclosed round of funding from Intel Capital. Speaktoit is also a resident of Skolkovo IT Cluster.

Product launches

Yandex incubator Yandex.Factory launches social commerce app SocialMart, which will use APIs of its comparison shopping service Yandex.Market. SocialMart is available on Facebook and VK.

News reviews

In Russia a new law may restrict foreign investors’ ability to back large Internet companies, or enable those companies to go public on foreign stock exchanges. The law is currently being reviewed by the legislators.

Jennifer L. Schenker of Informillo has compiled her own list of hottest Russian startups (where I would equate a word “startup” with “Internet company”). This is basically Runa Capital’s portfolio and a few more names from Forbes’s list.

With a tagline “Chat, flirt, love” Lithuanian Eskimi, a social network for users of feature phones continues to grow in Nigeria, Ghana, Vietnam and Indonesia as reported by Arctic Startup. It now boasts 7 million users.

Romanian VentureConnect’s pitching session took place this week. It saw presentation from BlueSeed, the visa-free startup community on the ship, which has PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel as a backer and a Romanian Dan Dascalescu as a co-founder. Makan Studios presented its palette generator app which extract colors from photos. For more names, read VentureConnect blog.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.